The yen plunged to a six-year low while stocks jumped with U.S. equity-index futures (SPX) as the Bank of Japan unexpectedly increased its target for monetary stimulus. Gold fell below $1,200 an ounce as bonds from Italy to Portugal climbed. Japan’s
currency tumbled 2.2 percent to 111.61 per dollar by 6 a.m. in New
York, the weakest since January 2008. The Stoxx Europe 600 Index added
1.2 percent, Japan’s Topix index jumped the most since June 2013 and
Standard & Poor’s 500 Index futures signaled the gauge may rise to a
record. Yields on 10-year notes in Italy, Portugal and Greece slid at
least five basis points. Russia’s ruble weakened 1 percent while stocks
gained as the central bank met. Gold retreated as
Lenovo Group Ltd. (992) said its $2.91
billion purchase of Motorola Mobility from Google Inc. (GOOGL) will help
the company boost global smartphone sales and challenge market
leaders Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) and Apple Inc. (AAPL)
“Lenovo will be number three in the global smartphone
market, but definitely we will not stop here,” Chief Executive
Officer Yang Yuanqing said in a telephone interview yesterday.
“We want to become the leader in the smartphone and mobile
devices area.”
The Motorola name will help Lenovo win sales in mature
markets such as the U.S. and Europe, where its own handsets have
made little headway, and serve as a premium brand in emerging
markets, Yang said. The acquisition, completed yesterday, also
gives Lenovo a new weapon in its battle for market share with
Xiaomi Corp., which surpassed the Beijing-based company in
third-quarter smartphone sales.
Lenovo boosted global smartphone shipments by 38 percent in
American virologist David Safronetz carries buckets containing blood samples from... Read More
The largest Ebola diagnostic lab in Liberia,
housed in a shabby brick building 65 miles (105 kilometers) east of the
capital Monrovia, can test about 80 to 90 blood samples a day.
Sometimes
it takes two days for the samples taken from patients to arrive there,
often in worn coolers carried on motorbike. By then, healthy people
awaiting results may have been confined to virus-ridden Ebola wards.
Sick people could have been accidentally diagnosed with other,
less-harmful diseases and sent back, contagious, into healthy
communities.
Scientists working on the West Africa outbreak said
reliance on the overworked labs far from patients has opened an
opportunity for several companies that are d
Bank of Japan
Governor Haruhiko Kuroda led a divided board to expand what was already
an unprecedentedly large monetary-stimulus program, boosting stocks and
sending the yen tumbling.
Kuroda, 70, and four of his eight fellow board members voted to raise the BOJ’s annual target for enlarging the monetary base
to 80 trillion yen ($724 billion), up from 60 to 70 trillion yen, the
central bank said. An increase was foreseen by just three of 32 analysts
surveyed by Bloomberg News. The BOJ also cut its forecasts for inflation and growth in Japan, the world’s third-biggest economy.
Facing
projections for failure to reach the BOJ’s 2 percent inflation target
in about two years, and with the pressure from a higher sales tax,
enlarging the stimulus at
Yasuhisa Shiozaki, Japan's health, labor and welfare minister.
Japan’s public pension fund will
announce new asset allocations today, a government official
said, buoying the nation’s stocks before the Bank of Japan’s
unexpected easing added even more impetus to the rally.
The 127.3 trillion yen ($1.2 trillion) Government Pension
Investment Fund will raise its targets for Japanese and foreign
stocks to 25 percent each, while reducing its domestic debt
allocation to 35 percent of assets and increasing overseas bonds
to 15 percent, the Nikkei newspaper reported, without saying
where it got the information. The figures are exclusive of
short-term assets. The government official who spoke on the
timing asked not to be named due to not being authorized to
comment publicly on the matter.
The Topix index soared as much as 4.4 percent in Tokyo
after
Burkina Faso Police clash with protesters as they protest against their longtime... Read More
Burkina Faso’s army said it took
power in the West African country after several days of protests
demanding the removal of President Blaise Compaore, who vowed to
stay on to oversee a transition.
The army has dissolved all the country’s institutions, and
plans to appoint a new head of state before restoring the
constitution in 12 months, Colonel Aboubacar Ba told reporters
late yesterday at army headquarters in the capital, Ouagadougou.
Compaore’s situation wasn’t immediately clear. The
president, who’s held power since 1987, said in a televised
address after the army statement that he’ll hand over to an
elected successor after a “transition period.” He thanked the
armed forces for “their professionalism and
“The general economic environment is slightly weaker than three to six months ago, but... Read More
British Airways parent IAG SA (IAG) said
it’s unperturbed by evidence of a slowing European economy as
cost cuts at Spanish arm Iberia and a focus on buoyant U.S.
markets put it in a stronger position than most major rivals.
IAG said today it’s sticking with a 1.8 billion euro ($2.3
billion) 2015 operating profit goal after Deutsche Lufthansa AG (LHA)
this week cut its outlook for the second time in six months and
Air France-KLM Group (AF) warned of sluggish fourth-quarter sales.
“The general economic environment is slightly weaker than
three to six months ago, but we have anticipated that,” Chief
Executive Officer Willie Walsh said on a conference call. “Our
market focus is good and restructuring is showing benefits.”
IAG, Europe’s third-biggest airline, has expanded British
Airways to
Construction at Cheniere Energy Inc.'s liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal is seen in... Read More
Oil’s collapse is eroding the appeal
of potential U.S. LNG exports to Asia as it cuts the cost of
competing supplies linked to the price of crude.
Brent’s 22 percent drop this year outpaced the 8.9 percent
decline in natural gas at Henry Hub, the benchmark for U.S.
liquefied natural gas shipments that are scheduled to begin in
2015. When the cost of processing and shipping American supplies
to Asia is taken into account, the price advantage over oil-linked cargoes from producers such as Qatar has more than
halved, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
While the U.S. shale boom prompts the world’s biggest
natural gas producer to plan exports of the fuel, it’s also
boosting the country’s crude output to the most in 30 years,
helping drive down global oil prices.
“The U.S. will not sell cheap gas,” Umar Jehangir, the
deputy secretary of development and joint ventures at Pakistan’s
Petroleum and Natural Resources Ministry, said in
Currency traders from London to Singapore
seeking to escape the clutches of U.S. prosecutors may get help from
the first banker to contest charges in an earlier crackdown on
interest-rate rigging.
Roger Darin, a former UBS AG (UBSN) trader in Zurich charged with conspiring to manipulate benchmark interest rates,
is asking a judge to throw out the case, saying his alleged conduct had
no connection to the U.S. The Justice Department’s response to the
challenge is due today.
A win by the Swiss national could make
it harder for the U.S. to ensnare foreign traders in its probe of
currency manipulation, which has been under way for more than a year and
may dwarf the long-running investigation into the rigging of benchmark
interest rates set in London. While the currency probe has yet to result
in any charges, prosecutors say they are coming soon.
“A
government loss would
Ksenia Yudaeva, First Deputy Governor of the Bank of Russia, said as recently as Oct.... Read More
Currency traders who have been taking advantage of the Russian
central bank’s predictable market interventions are about to find making
money a lot harder, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
The
bank’s analysts said they expect policy makers will abandon rules-based
currency interventions at a meeting today, freeing themselves up to sell
enough dollars and euros when needed to support the ruble. The central
bank will also raise the benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point to 8.5 percent, they said, in line with the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey.
Speculation
that policy makers will act to stabilize the currency triggered the
biggest daily appreciation since at least 2003 yesterday. The ruble
slumped to records against the dollar on seven consecutive days before
the rebound, even as the central bank spent $28 billion on
